Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The first visit of a Canadian Prime Minister to Beijing in nearly a decade is, unsurprisingly, given China's centrality to the world economy, much discussed and debated in the Canadian media. However, it is not just that Mark Carney is visiting the world's second-largest economy. There are at least a few other reasons.

First, he is visiting China while the U.S. is breathing threateningly and aggressively down Canada's neck in its Trump II rogue avatar in the most unwelcome way possible, all sticks and no carrots.

Moreover, Canadians gave Carney's Liberal Party an overwhelming mandate just last spring to pry Canada loose from the clutches of the U.S. and diversify the country's economic relations. The logical implication of deepening relations with China would be non-controversial were it not for sections of the political and corporate class which prefer to kowtow to Trump's bullying.

They dress up this abjection in the garb of Canada's "shared values" with the West, even as the Trump administration rides roughshod over them and portray China as a serial violator of human rights, trade rules and the integrity of Canada's political process.

Furthermore, Carney's Beijing trip is a hot topic because, over the past nearly four decades, Canada's rulers have chosen to cozy up to the U.S. This went against the caution, sounded by many progressive economists as early as the 1960s, that Canada had become too dependent on the U.S., practically a colony hosting U.S. "branch plants" and "silently surrendering" its economic sovereignty.

Unheeding, Canada's rulers concluded the 1988 U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, and then the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). They got a rude shock when, thanks to the U.S.'s internal political crisis, itself prompted by its economic decline, Trump won two elections on an anti-trade, "America First" platform. In his first term, he tore up NAFTA and forced concessions from Canada and Mexico in the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Carney is visiting China amid a further re-negotiation of that treaty, Trump's threats about making Canada the 51st U.S. state, taking over Greenland on Canada's northwestern flank, imposing tariffs and demanding increased military spending.

All this must be faced when, thanks to decades of ever-closer relations with the U.S., Canada has an extremely externalized economy with a 65.18 percent trade to GDP ratio in 2024, and 67.3 percent of its exports going to the U.S. as of October 2025. 

Finally, while the issue of the diversification of Canada's international economic relations has been placed more urgently on the agenda than ever before, and with Canadians truly turned off by the Trump administration, China is among Canada's best prospects.

However, Canada remains part of the imperial world. Although without formal colonies, it is a settler-colonial society ensconced for centuries in a very favorable niche in the imperial system. As such, it has difficulty facing up to today's multipolar world in which non-Western powers, preeminently China, loom large, while at the same time nursing the illusion that closer relations with the UK and the EU could suffice as an alternative to the U.S.

While these five weighty reasons make Carney's visit to China controversial, they also constitute reasons why closer relations between China and Canada will be to the mutual benefit of Canadians and Chinese.

China is not just one of the world's most important countries; it is the rising one, while the U.S. is the declining one. While the U.S.'s loss of capabilities and options has reduced Trump to increasingly desperate, destructive and dangerous actions, on the world stage generally and towards Canada, China has emerged as an oasis of stability, predictability and economic, financial and technological prowess.

During the last trip by former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Beijing in 2017, while hopes of a free trade agreement were dashed on his liberal hubris about Western values and his government's evidence-free accusations against China on human rights and trade, the one salutary effect of the Trump presidency has been to undermine and expose such Western hypocrisy. Carney can use the resulting freedom and deal with China openly and objectively.

While Canada's very deep entanglement with the U.S., in economic terms, not to mention security terms, will make progress in dvancing China-Canada economic relations difficult, the urgency of diversifying away from the U.S. is unlikely to diminish, and China is Canada's most attractive option. 

Hard as it may seem for Canadians to contemplate closer relations with non-Western countries, appearances can be deceptive. Quite apart from China's many economic attractions, as the world's oldest continuous civilization, China has much to offer Canada and the world, not just economically but also culturally, a fact that will be easier for today's highly diverse Canadian population to recognize than ever before. 

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